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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25373098">city's on fire</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark'>themorninglark</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Haikyuu!!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Gen, Memory Alteration, Osaka, Past Lives, Reincarnation, allusions to manga chapter 378 and later, the cyberpunk elements are pretty light</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 10:08:14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>10,528</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25373098</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/themorninglark</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>The memory roads look like the old city. The Osaka they see in posters outside the manzai theatre in Tennoji, with bicycles on the roads and power lines criss-crossing a wide open sky, instead of rail tracks in whips of neon. When he's there, the first thing Osamu always thinks is: how quiet it is. How quiet memories are, compared to the constant electric hum of the grid. Many years after his first run on the roads, he will ride the lift up to Kita Shinsuke’s rooftop farm and he will recognise the same quiet in that place.</p>
</blockquote><p>
In which Osamu and Atsumu will hack your memories for a price, and it turns out to be greater than either of them imagined.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kita Shinsuke &amp; Miya Atsumu &amp; Miya Osamu, Miya Atsumu &amp; Miya Osamu</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>32</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>138</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>city's on fire</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p><b>Please note</b> that this fic bears the "Reincarnation" and "Past Lives" tags. So although I have not applied the Major Character Death warning, there is reference to deaths of past lives, only in that context. No deaths in present time!</p><p>Mood and title music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4Xhk5V6DLs">Hypnosis Mic, "Survival of the Illest"</a><br/>Soundtrack: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaT0RFJBlF4&amp;list=PLvciSMh3gko5dCv-xZGDzAPZOMEPWYrH1"><i>Shadowrun: Hong Kong</i></a></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Sand. This is sand, under his feet. It takes Osamu a moment to process the sensation, to scoop up a handful of the stuff and let it slip through his fingers as he stands. He’d thought it was ash, thought he’d emerged somewhere around a restless volcano because it wouldn’t be the first time. How realistic. The rolling of the waves, their foamy peaks, the echoing tumble and crash against distant bluffs, and then it hits Osamu a moment delayed along with the smell of salt, that he is standing here in front of the real thing and comparing it with a holograph on a billboard in Dotonbori.</p><p>He takes off his shoes, lets them dangle from one hand and walks down the shore, leaving no footprints. It’s dusk on the water. Lanterns lit in gold and wishes, hundreds of them, are drifting off towards the horizon. Even at this hour, Obon season is warmer than Osamu likes. He’s got too many layers on, but at least there’s a breeze ruffling his hair and this should be quick anyway, he’ll be in and out before he starts sweating. The remnants of lost love are always easy to spot.</p><p>He sees their client now, in a long white summer dress. Little Owl. That was the name she’d given them when she signed in, <em>Kofukurou-san</em>, and explained what she wanted; they never ask for anyone’s real name. Little Owl is currently asleep in a pod under Atsumu’s watchful eye, and the version of her in front of Osamu is six months younger. She bends down to let a lantern go, candle flame flickering in her eyes. A web of roads extends from her feet. Trails made by gentle and not-so-gentle tides alike, possibilities etched in time. Some dew-bright like a spider’s line catching the last light, some red as blood and fate, some so faint Osamu hears rather than sees them, a string being plucked over and over again to find a particular chord.</p><p>The path Little Owl chose is a solid one marked in the sand. Osamu finds a different thread, a silken one humming pink, and takes hold of it.</p><p>This is the part that always gets him. Atsumu says it’s like standing under a waterfall. Osamu says it’s like sticking his hand in a bucket of ice. We can’t all be like you, Tsumu, he adds, not everyone likes being splashed with cold water in the name of <em>mental strength training</em>, or whatever.</p><p>Exhale. Eyes closed. There’s a woman at the end of this thread. She has fireworks in her hands and an open smile on her face. On the sand-trodden path, Little Owl sees her, but does not go to her. She stands at the edge of the water all night and watches the other woman light up the sky, then leaves without saying a word to her. She will return to her desk job on Monday and think of a mouth she could have kissed.</p><p>Osamu opens his eyes and breathes. The pink thread lights up. Little Owl takes one step forward, then another. He holds on long enough to make sure she’s well on her way, that the new memory is starting to take, steady and glowing. She’ll wake up in that pod, all warm with the remembrance of a summer fling on her last holiday. Soft lips, slow music, strawberry shaved ice. Promises of what could have been are thrumming down the thread. She’ll fill in the rest in her mind.</p><p>He lets go of the pink thread, watches it grow solid and strong, then crouches to lay both hands on the path in the sand, already fading. He stands at the next turn of the tide, a milk-white crystal shard nestled in one fist. A real memory, in exchange for a false one; but as Atsumu likes to point out, who’s to say that whatever you remember isn’t <em>real</em> anyway?</p><p>Osamu starts running. The sea makes a silent splash when he hits it. He does not stop moving, even as the cuffs of his trousers grow soaked and his bare toes start to feel like they’re pickling in salt, and then the road paves itself for him and he’s not running on water any more. A window opens into their workshop, where he’s sitting cross-legged next to Little Owl’s pod, one hand clutching the seashell she’d brought them as a gateway into her memories.</p><p>They never did get round to painting the walls in here. They’re still a bare industrial concrete grey, but he’d let Atsumu put up fairy lights, one Christmas, and then Atsumu just never took them down, and Osamu never said anything to him about it. Today, they are a steady, molten gold. That means Atsumu’s in a good mood.</p><p>He lunges through that window, but not before the sea at Kamakura throws him one more parting gift: a glimpse in wild sea spray, a boy who looks like him, standing at the end of a dock. He has a peaked cap and a rolled up paper in his hands, a high-collared jacket too heavy for any season outside of winter and grief. He stares out at the horizon as if waiting for a ship to come in, but before Osamu sees whether it does, or what becomes of that boy, he’s tumbled out into his own body, in his own time, and Atsumu’s blurring into sight before him, one hand on his shoulder.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>After Little Owl leaves satisfied, Atsumu manhandles Osamu onto a bar stool and shoves a heaping bowl of rice in front of him. “Eat.”</p><p>The rice cooker’s still turned on. The warm, fluffy smell wafts across to the kitchen counter, and Osamu settles down with an obedience less grudging than usual. Atsumu piles used coffee cups in the sink like a Jenga tower.</p><p>“There’s <em>umeboshi</em> in this,” Osamu says, round his second mouthful of rice.</p><p>The cups topple. Osamu smirks. Atsumu glares at them, hands on hips, then turns to nod at a small paper bag sitting next to the toaster. “I opened the package Kita-san gave us, last time.”</p><p>“I thought we were saving that for a special occasion.”</p><p>“Yeah, and the way you looked when you came out of that job—”</p><p>“That wasn’t special.”</p><p>Atsumu goes to the fridge. “You looked like ass. What did you see?”</p><p>He asks this question hidden behind an open door, no doubt about to drink their milk right out of the carton. <em>What did you see</em>, as if he’s casually inquiring after the weather, or the pudding stash clearly marked with Osamu’s name. <em>Hey, Samu, I’m going to eat this one.</em> Admittedly a vast improvement from before, when he’d simply eat it and Osamu would find out from the cup in the trash.</p><p>So because Atsumu asked, Osamu tells him the truth.</p><p>“Another past life. I mean, a new one. Haven’t seen this one before. I was standing at the docks, and waiting for a ship, or something.”</p><p>Atsumu shuts the door. His hands are empty. “Like, a big ship? A navy ship?”</p><p>“Dunno. Came back here before it showed up.”</p><p>“How’d you know you were waiting for a ship if it didn’t show up?”</p><p>“How’d you know it was a navy ship?”</p><p>Atsumu’s smile twists, the way it does when he’s holding on too tight to a memory, when the shard’s made marks in his palm by the time Osamu prises it out. He never realises he’s doing it, or so he says. He never realises he goes quite so hard, when he runs the memory roads. Osamu watches now, doesn’t take his eyes off him, as Atsumu leans back against the fridge and stares at the ceiling.</p><p>There are no fairy lights in here. When they’d bought this narrow, odd-shaped shophouse years ago, turned the front of it into their fledgling memory workshop and the back into their home, Osamu had claimed the kitchen as his own and installed only one self-indulgent item, a state-of-the-art rice cooker that Atsumu said looked like a space capsule.</p><p>Osamu takes his time to chew, and swallow. The plum is sweet in his mouth. “That life didn’t end well, huh.”</p><p>“Maybe for <em>you</em>, it did. Didn’t see me, did you?”</p><p>“Like that means anything. You think I always know what you’re up to in <em>this</em> life?”</p><p>Atsumu jams his hands in his pockets. “Let’s just say you would’ve been waiting a while for that ship.”</p><p>“So, it went down?”</p><p>Atsumu shrugs. “Don’t remember.”</p><p>Osamu sets down his empty bowl. He’s never seen himself drowning, nor Atsumu, and it’s not like they really <em>feel</em> the sensations of their past lives. It’s more like watching some kind of strange, shadowy kabuki on a stage that spans thousands of years. Still, it can’t have been pleasant for Atsumu, watching himself drown.</p><p>He’s wondered before if this is the toll they pay, for access to the memory roads: these glimpses of past lives, haunting them round every bend and corner. Sometimes, Osamu thinks the price is too high. Atsumu’s always been a reckless spendthrift.</p><p>Osamu wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Thanks for the food.”</p><p>Atsumu leans over. Palm to counter, picks up the white shard, tosses it high in the air like it’s weightless and catches it again, all in one breath.</p><p>“Stop doing that. You’re going to break one someday,” Osamu says.</p><p>“And so?” Atsumu grins. “Plenty more where it came from. Memories are cheap, dear brother. Shall we go?”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>As they pile into their car, the gold-lit signboard overhead flickers once, twice, blinks out of sight for a moment. They do not notice. They will not notice until the time for fixing signs is past, and the city has forgotten what they used to do, and they, too, barely remember.</p><p> </p><p>MIYA MEMORY EMPORIUM<br/><em>be happier, today</em></p><p> </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It’s a smooth ride downtown tonight. Aran’s just given their car a tune-up, the green lights are on their side, and the other drivers don’t bump and crowd them the way they do, sometimes, when Atsumu’s behind the wheel. It’s entirely Atsumu’s fault, for pretending the <em>cruise</em> setting doesn’t exist. He likes having his feet on the pedals the old-fashioned way, likes to make contact with the gravel and the burning rubber.</p><p>Atsumu always drives, even though, in Osamu’s opinion, he is the better driver, where <em>better</em> means <em>less likely to get them killed in a speeding accident</em>. They don’t talk about that past life. They don’t talk about being lucky thirteen and waking to sit bolt upright, safe in their bunk beds, Atsumu clambering up the ladder to grab Osamu’s face in his hands, staring at it until Osamu leans forward to knock him on the forehead. Atsumu whispering, <em>hey, Samu, your face looks really ugly all banged up</em>.</p><p>These days, their autopilot knows Atsumu’s driving habits well enough to keep them in one piece, and it makes Atsumu happy to drive, so Osamu rests his arm on the rolled-down window and listens to the grid. He hears it best most of all out here like this, where it hums, resonant and steady beneath the road, all around them. That faint green glow from the cracks in the asphalt. The source of all the power in Osaka. Outside, an electric blue sign flickering in and out of sight points the way to an apothecary with the shutters down.</p><p>“Stop. You’ll overshoot again,” he says, rapping Atsumu’s arm with his knuckles.</p><p>Atsumu skids to a halt at the corner. “I did not <em>overshoot</em> the last time. The sign was out. Remember?”</p><p>“Yeah, yeah.”</p><p>Osamu gets out of the car, and knocks three times against the shutters. Overhead, a window opens and a messy bedhead appears. Akagi rubs his eyes and looks around, then grins when Osamu waves up at him. “Osamu!”</p><p>“Sorry to come after hours.”</p><p>“It’s no trouble. Meet you at the back?” Akagi calls, and Osamu nods.</p><p>As he walks round to the back of the store, he hears an engine behind him, revving into a sleek purr. Their car doesn’t make noises like that unless the driver wants them to. Atsumu’s probably gone off to circle the block, as loudly as he does everything else, when he gets bored of staying in one place.</p><p>Akagi’s already standing at the door when Osamu gets there. He has a can of green tea in his hand, which he tosses over.</p><p>“Tip for you. Busy night tonight?”</p><p>Osamu grabs the can. It’s warm. “Yeah. Can’t stay to chat, I’m afraid. Here you go.”</p><p>He reaches into his jacket, pulls out a small woven pouch and passes it over. The memory shard inside makes no sound, but when Osamu drops it into his open palm, Akagi stumbles to catch the heft of it and lets out a low whistle.</p><p>“This feels like a good one.”</p><p>“Should give you enough juice to fix the sign outside, at least,” Osamu remarks.</p><p>Akagi sighs. “I’ve tried, man. Don’t know what’s wrong with it. Thanks for this, anyway.”</p><p>Osamu meets Akagi’s fistbump and returns to the kerbside, cracks the canned tea open and drinks deep. Hanging from the post above him is a lantern shaped like a pufferfish that’s cute on good days and grotesque the rest of the time. Fugu-chan marked the spot decades ago, say the people round here, those who stayed, when there was a sushi bar at that corner and Shinsekai was Osaka’s brave new world. These days the spot’s a run-down ruin, overgrown with wisteria on the metal skeleton of someone’s old house. One man’s trash heap, another man’s garden. It’s the grid, goes the word on the street: all that power radiating under the city makes the plants grow wild. Some nights, Osamu thinks he sees phosphorescent moths among the flowers. They never stay still long enough for him to catch a good look.</p><p>Atsumu pulls up, and he gets in. So the evening goes: they make their deliveries all round the sector, from little shops like Akagi’s apothecary and the tea alchemist’s place, to the penny arcade and the radio tower, where about ten different frequencies are on in the lobby all at once.</p><p>
  <em>“…low chance of rain, we’re in for a dry winter.”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“Earlier this evening, a blackout was reported on the outskirts of Sakai City. This is the third city blackout this quarter…”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“And now for the latest skytrain upgrading announcements from Kansai Grid Co—”</em>
</p><p>Osamu nods at the night watchman, and goes to the counter to hand over his biggest pouch of shards. It’s not particularly high quality stuff, this lot: minor collateral, runoff and fallout, but the big companies buy their power supply in bulk and aren’t picky. When they sort their harvest every month, Atsumu always sets the best aside for old friends.</p><p>Atsumu’s got his seat reclined and is napping when Osamu climbs back into the car, pockets considerably lighter. Osamu has to shake him a few times before he cracks one eye open.</p><p>“Last stop?” Osamu asks.</p><p>Atsumu stretches, grins and cranks his seat upright. “Finally.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The memory roads look like the old city. The Osaka they see in posters outside the manzai theatre in Tennoji, with bicycles on the roads and power lines criss-crossing a wide open sky, instead of rail tracks in whips of neon. When he's there, the first thing Osamu always thinks is: how quiet it is. How quiet memories are, compared to the constant electric hum of the grid. Many years after his first run on the roads, he will ride the lift up to Kita Shinsuke’s rooftop farm and he will recognise the same quiet in that place.</p><p>They do not dream, Osamu and Atsumu. They sleep, and walk, and wake, and where the past lives end and the present begins, Osamu only knows because Atsumu is breathing so hard it’s worse than the snoring.</p><p>Tsumu, he says, Tsumu, wake up, and then Atsumu does and says something different every time. Samu, I saw us. We were older. We were younger. We were running away from a temple on fire and the bamboo forest swallowed us up. We danced for a Heian emperor and you wore a fox headdress. We were <em>actually</em> foxes and time didn’t mean anything to us then. Samu, I saw us, but not us.</p><p><em>It was us.</em> Osamu never says it. He keeps very still and lets Atsumu talk, lets Atsumu glean everything he needs to know from his silence.</p><p>He supposes they have been doing this since they were born. The first time Osamu does remember, he is six years old and he is hand-in-hand with his twin, and they are standing at a junction, sharing an umbrella. The umbrella is yellow. They have little caps on and there is a vending machine at the corner. When Osamu goes to press a button, he is, for this moment, another him, a him ten years older with a sports bag slung on his back, and the road leads to Amagasaki. He does not question this, even though he has never been to Amagasaki.</p><p>The Atsumu in this dream reaches for his milk box, and takes a loud slurp before Osamu can stop him.</p><p>Then he wakes up, and Atsumu is licking his lips, eyes open, and Osamu says the first thing he can think of. <em>Why’d you steal my milk?</em></p><p><em>Borrowed</em>, Atsumu mumbles into his pillow, <em>borrowed.</em></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>On their way up Tsutenkaku, they stop on the fifth floor observation deck to see Billiken and rub the soles of his feet. They used to be shiny, Kita told them once, from being rubbed so often, but these days he’s just a funny relic of the old city. <em>People don’t believe in gods so much now</em>. Kita smiles when he says that, like he’s telling a joke only he understands.</p><p>Osamu doesn’t know if he believes, but if he’s going to drop a coin in any god’s box, the God of Happiness or <em>things as they ought to be</em> seems as good as any. And it pleases Kita, to know that people other than him are stopping by to say hi to Billiken from time to time.</p><p>“Hope you’re looking after Kita-san,” says Atsumu, glancing back at the statue as they re-enter the lift.</p><p>“I think it’s more like the other way round,” Osamu murmurs.</p><p>The grape ivy grows ever more verdant up the tower as they ascend. Atsumu’s shifting from one foot to the other, restless, face pressed to the glass of the lift as though he could swallow the whole of Osaka from this height, and the lights of Shinsekai lead them as they always do right here to this tower, to the heart of the city.</p><p>The doors open. They step out into a cool breeze and the sweet smell of winter honeysuckle, twining up the torii as they pass through. Atsumu breathes deep, sighs it out and tips his head up.</p><p>Osamu follows his gaze. Here, they are closer to the sky than anywhere else in the city; even the skytrains are streaks that soar several storeys below them. Yet as they approach the greenhouse where Kita’s silhouette is visible, moving round a patch of wheat-sheaf gold, Osamu feels like he’s never too far from the ground.</p><p>Kita always knows they’re coming. Osamu knocks anyway.</p><p>“Come in,” Kita calls.</p><p>When he says it, it sounds like <em>okaeri</em>.</p><p>“Sorry for intruding,” says Atsumu, as they remove their shoes and Osamu pushes the door open without a sound.</p><p>Kita’s hanging up his gloves. He glances at them. “You’re not intruding. I was expecting you. Thank you for coming.”</p><p>Osamu reaches into his pocket, and takes out the last shard. The best one. Atsumu had come home with this, said: the road he was on wasn’t like anything he’d seem before, it went up a mountain and through a hundred torii, and at the top of the mountain was a temple. How he got there, from the memories of a client born and raised in inner city Tokyo, Osamu didn’t ask. Atsumu plays the roads like a street race Osamu never signed up for. Not that Osamu can’t do the same, if he wanted, not that he can’t tease a faint memory of <em>the sea</em> or <em>the mountain</em> from someone’s life and jump roads across time and space; it’s just the ice bucket thing again. Atsumu is, frankly, masochistic.</p><p>But he is right that there is a purity about this memory shard, and so they have saved it for Kita.</p><p>Kita holds it in both hands, like an offering, and he raises it to his mouth and closes his eyes. Osamu takes a step back. No one else does this, only Kita, no one else sees the memory shards as anything but a powerful battery, but Kita always says a prayer and even if Osamu and Atsumu do not understand, they are quiet, for this long.</p><p>“This is a good one,” says Kita. “Thank you.”</p><p>He goes to the generator on the far wall, an model older than anything Osamu’s seen in Den Den Town, even in the vintage shops. It’s a strange box that’s either black or deep red depending on the season, and doesn’t hum like everything else. Osamu can’t for the life of him understand how Kita makes it work. It does, against all logic of the grid, and it keeps the greenhouse warm, and the rice growing.</p><p>Other greenhouses are full of pretty flowers, lavender and roses. Kita has those too: in winter, the amaryllis and daffodils bloom from the frost in the concrete, all round the garden outside. But here in the greenhouse, the pride and joy of the farm, he only grows rice. He grows it all year round. It is the best rice Osamu has ever eaten.</p><p>Kita pops a panel open and slides the shard in. After a few seconds, the whole greenhouse begins to glow a soft, warm white. The rice patch next to Osamu rustles, and then, in quiet symphony, so do all the rest; there is no window open and yet, through the glass all around them, there sings a breeze that makes everything feel alive. Standing here, Osamu feels himself a half-step out of time, feels like he could forget it was winter, forget it was night and daybreak’s still hours away. From Atsumu’s silence, he feels the same.</p><p>Kita gathers his tools and sets them aside with care, back into the small shed near the generator. Trowel, bucket, rake. Not a speck of dirt on them.</p><p>“Come,” he says. “I’ll make tea.”</p><p>The sakura tree in the centre of the rooftop stands bare. On the other side of the path, the ume’s in full white bloom and there’s a mat with several cushions laid out by its roots. Osamu goes to sit in seiza as best he can, while Atsumu holds still for all of two seconds before unwinding to stretch his legs out.</p><p>Kita brings a tea tray over to them. Three cups, three sticks of kinako dango.</p><p>“I had your umeboshi today with rice. It was good,” says Osamu.</p><p>“I’m glad to hear that. The ume is growing well this year. Atsumu, are you all right?”</p><p>Atsumu’s yawning. He sits up straight when Kita asks, hand to shoulder sliding round the back of his neck like he’s rubbing a sore spot, and tilts his head one way, then another. Osamu’s seen this gesture, that movement, in a past life, one where they were surrounded by floodlights and a crowd the colour of a brass band, and in another, where they were not human. As a wild fox, Atsumu moved in much the same way he is doing now. As a wild fox, Osamu was the hungrier hunter.</p><p>What the people of Osaka do not know is that beneath the slick neon of the grid, beneath the pavements paved in dirty footprints and the shadows of billboards and so many fierce hopes, the memories still bleed. The more time Osamu spends on the memory roads, the more he sees them in his waking life. Running all through the streets, stretching out from the feet of everyone he passes by. It is only when he looks at Atsumu that he sees nothing at all, and that was the way it was, for so many years, until they met Kita.</p><p><em>No, not at all,</em> Kita had said, when Osamu asked if he, too, was a memory runner. <em>I’m just an ordinary person.</em></p><p>“Crick in my neck,” Atsumu says.</p><p>“You seem tired.”</p><p>“Slept funny, that’s all. ’S nothing.”</p><p>Osamu looks down into the teacup he’s holding, wonders not for the first time at how it ripples when there’s no wind, wonders at the light he glimpsed in Atsumu’s eyes, electric and sharp.</p><p>Kita takes a bite of his dango. He doesn’t say anything more, only lets his gaze remain on Atsumu until Atsumu ducks his head and says something about the weather. Later, Kita will get the spare gloves out, ask Osamu and Atsumu if they will help him weed the daffodils, and they’ll get their hands dirty in soil and it will feel real, it will feel good, with the moon bright enough to touch Osamu on the cheek, to pool round Atsumu’s fingertips, quickening.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Some nights, Osamu goes out alone and on foot. Atsumu’s always ready to slide behind the wheel and into the speeding lane, and when Osamu tells him he drives too fast, like he eats too fast, tells him he’d rather walk so he doesn’t carelessly miss things, Atsumu only says he’s going to leave Osamu in the dust one day.</p><p>On Jan Jan Yokocho, the shogi parlours are click-clack noisy while the go clubs thrum with a reverent hush. Takoyaki carts roll up and down the narrow pathway, and Osamu gets a box for himself to snack on as he makes his way to the end of the street. Where the shamisen used to ring out down the alley, there’s a jukebox playing an old jazz number about sunshine. Osamu looks up. If he’d never seen the sun in the memory roads, unfiltered through a haze of artificial light and criss-crossing skytrain tracks, he would not have understood a song like that.</p><p>He finds the unmarked black door to Suna’s bar where it always is, climbs a narrow flight of stairs and meanders across the smoky room to the bar counter. Standing room only. Suna’s doing well. The fish tank at the back of the bar is the brightest thing in the room, a swirl of neon tetra among deep blue coral.</p><p>“You look tired,” says Osamu, leaning across the counter.</p><p>Suna looks up from the glass he’s wiping down. “Are you here for a drink, or did you come just to mock my face?”</p><p>But he’s already setting the fancy crystal ware aside, and for Osamu, he reaches into a drawer to pull a packet of rice crackers, rips it open and tips it into an empty bowl.</p><p>“Neither. But thanks for the food,” says Osamu, grabbing a fistful.</p><p>“Thanks for eating my expired snacks. I can always count on you.”</p><p>“I’m very reliable. You think these snacks are hard to make?” Osamu turns a cracker over in his hand. “I could do them better. This one needs more seaweed.”</p><p>Suna raises his eyebrows. “What, thinking of quitting your day job?”</p><p>Osamu’s lips quirk up in a half-smile. “Maybe, if Tsumu wouldn’t kill me.”</p><p>He takes a little black velvet pouch from his jacket’s inner pocket, and tosses it over for Suna to catch. These memory shards make a sound like the wind and the distant cry of seagulls. Suna slips one out and slides it into a panel on the wall, waiting for the glow round the bar counter to brighten gently before shutting the panel and banging on it a few times for good measure.</p><p>“That better keep the blackouts away. The fish don’t like them,” Suna mutters.</p><p>“You’ve been getting them here too?” Osamu’s nearing the bottom of the bowl. He slows down, popping the snacks into his mouth one at a time and taking his time to chew.</p><p>Suna nods. “Last night, the amps just cut out halfway through live rock hour. Started going sharp, then static, then died. Ginjima freestyled the rest of his set a cappella.”</p><p>“Bet he enjoyed that,” Osamu murmurs. “These blackouts happen often?”</p><p>“Now and then. More often, these days.”</p><p>Osamu glances over to the stage, standing dark tonight. Once, Atsumu told him of a past life where they performed on a stage like that, where Atsumu played the piano and Osamu sang, hard as it is for Osamu to imagine. Surely, it would have been Atsumu in the spotlight that loved him so much. Surely, he would have stayed in the shadows, content.</p><p>In this life, Osamu doesn’t know a C sharp from a minor chord, and his fingers are not made for music. He looks down at the empty bowl. Only crumbs left now. Crumbs and remnants and what remains, all over his hands, that’s all there is.</p><p>He leans over the counter for another packet of snacks, only for Suna to whirl round and smack him on the wrist with a damp dishrag. “If you’re not going to order anything, stop stealing my food.”</p><p>“Your food is expired,” Osamu points out.</p><p>Suna opens the fridge, takes out a can of Asahi and places it in front of Osamu. Osamu sighs and pulls it towards him.</p><p>“I’ll even throw in a fancy umbrella for free,” says Suna, sliding him a coaster with a small pink umbrella resting on it.</p><p>“Kita-san throws in dango for free.”</p><p>“Kita-san’s not running a business. Kita-san is…” Suna pauses, trails off, and that furrow in his forehead is one that Osamu’s worn himself, before he decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to explain <em>Kita-san</em> to anyone who didn’t already understand.</p><p>“Kita-san’s Kita-san,” says Osamu. He holds his can up to Suna, who meets it with a clink from his own water glass, and they drink.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>When he gets back, the laundry is done and Atsumu’s fallen asleep face down in a beanbag, radio still blaring loud enough that Osamu could hear it from the shopfront. Tonight, the blackouts have moved to Matsubara. The Kansai Grid Co, says the static crackle, apologises for the outages, they are looking into the problems and will do everything they can to resolve them.</p><p>Osamu pops the washing machine door open and wrinkles his nose. Another twenty minutes at Suna’s, and these clothes would have tipped irredeemably from <em>lavender breeze</em> to <em>wet dog</em>.</p><p>“The next time it’s bedsheet day, you’re doing it,” he mutters, pulling the heap of clothes out into the basket. He kicks the back door open with one foot while Atsumu snores blithely into his blankets. For that, Osamu clips all of Atsumu’s embarrassing socks, the ones with little cartoons of otoro sushi all over them, so they face the neighbours’ yards and everyone can see them.</p><p>Right at the bottom of the basket is Osamu’s favourite jacket, the blue chambray one. As he shakes out the wrinkles, something falls out of it and lands at his feet, soundlessly.</p><p>Osamu drapes his jacket on the line and looks down. A few long seconds go by before he picks up the strange object.</p><p>It’s a memory shard, at least, it looks like one, but also it doesn’t. It’s not <em>wrong</em>, not exactly; the shards don’t have identical regular forms or anything and every one’s a bit different anyway, but this one seems to—shift, almost, like it can’t decide what kind of shape or colour it wants to have. One second it’s like holding an emerald with a point cut so sharp it could draw blood. The next, it’s an eight-sided die the colour of every fish in Suna’s tank. If Osamu didn’t know better, he could’ve sworn it was glitching.</p><p>But memories didn’t glitch. Not on the roads, not once they were harvested. Memories were solid. Unchangeable.</p><p>Overhead, a midnight train streaks the sky, green and white headlights catching funny on the shard. Osamu turns it over in his hand, holds it up against glowing train tracks. It <em>is</em> glitching. The edges of it keep fuzzing in and out like there’s some kind of error, like the programming of this memory’s got itself all mixed up with something else, somewhere else.</p><p>He’s never seen a shard like this before. What it’s doing in his jacket, he hasn’t the slightest idea. Resolving to ask Atsumu if he knows anything about it, Osamu slips it into his back pocket and brings the basket back indoors.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Once, and only once, Atsumu is not in his life when Osamu steps slantways into a cobbled back alley wet with rain, and emerges in the pavilion of a golden temple halfway built. Slats of woods sanded down, gold leaf so blinding he can’t look directly at it. 1397. The Muromachi period. In this life, Osamu is a labourer; he sees himself covered in rags and sweat, and Atsumu is not there.</p><p>Days later, Atsumu will tell him the other half of it: of a shogun’s adopted son peering round the corner at a boy who looks just like him, only dirtier. A family who’d given up one of their twin boys at birth, because they would never be able to afford two hungry mouths. Because down in the marketplace, the daikon farmer had told them he’d heard from his wife who had heard from the sister of the woodcutter that the shogun’s wife, whose belly had never swelled, prayed every day at Amaterasu-Ookami’s shrine for a blessing from the heavens.</p><p>When Osamu asks if they ever met in that lifetime, Atsumu’s answering smile is radiant.</p><p>So again, and again; and if the possibility of being born apart ever occurs to Atsumu, Osamu does not know. He never runs far enough, fast enough, to see the end of the road. Atsumu, chasing whips of sunlight, does.</p><p><em>I just gotta see how it ends,</em> and he grins, such a shit-eating grin, <em>gotta make sure I lived a happier life than you, right, Samu?</em></p><p>Right.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Wednesdays are their busiest days in the workshop. It’s the midweek effect, is Atsumu’s theory: people are restless, people are bored, and they don’t get many clients on weekends because it’s hard to explain to family and friends where you’ve gone. <em>Can’t just say, oh, I’m popping out for a bit to get my memory hacked, can you?</em></p><p>They take turns on Wednesdays, which is as fair as anything can be, between the two of them. But the minute all the fairy lights go red and Atsumu starts to <em>scream</em>, fairness is a child’s game with rules to be broken, broken, broken.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Osamu’s not there when it happens. He’s in the kitchen making tamagoyaki, and when he hears Atsumu, he drops the pan on the floor and the egg spills everywhere.</p><p>Later, he will not remember any of this, he will not remember running to the pod room and clapping his hands over his ears, over Atsumu’s mouth, upon his shoulders, shaking him. He will remember, faintly, glancing over at the pod and mouthing a silent <em>thank you</em> to Oomimi for this fresh batch of rice wine brewed from Kita’s latest crop, potent enough that the client’s still knocked out.</p><p>“What have you done, you idiot?” Osamu murmurs, dropping to his knees beside Atsumu, who’s covered in cold sweat and slumped back against the wall, one leg twitching. As Osamu takes his hand in both of his and closes his eyes, the last thing he sees is the fairy lights fizzling out.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>He is falling. He is holding his breath. He has forgotten how to breathe. He breathes, now, and the air is red. His eyes are still shut. When he opens them, he does so together with his mouth and he swallows a gasp and for the first time in more than ten years, he is next to Atsumu on the memory roads.</p><p>Beneath their feet, an old-fashioned railroad track warps itself round them, strips of metal and wood melting into stones made of seeds and orange peel. Everything smells like an orchard out of season. Everything is wrong, everything in Osamu’s gut cries out <em>wrong</em>; all the client wanted was a memory of saying a farewell he’d missed at a train station, but they’re not standing at any kind of station Osamu’s ever seen in real life.</p><p>“Samu,” says Atsumu. He is not screaming. He is hoarse and very, very quiet, which is worse. “Why are you here?”</p><p>“Why am I here? Why am I <em>here</em>?”</p><p>Osamu hears his own voice start to pitch high, tremors starting in the pit of his stomach before they reach his fist before his fist reaches Atsumu’s face. It’s a miracle, in all honesty, that he’s never tried this before, that he’s never punched Atsumu when they’re here, given that he’s punched Atsumu in every other place known to them both. But if experience is anything to go by, that bruise won’t show when they both wake up. More’s the pity.</p><p>“I’m here because something is fucked up! And it’s probably <em>you</em>! Look, we need to—”</p><p>Atsumu grabs the sleeve of his shirt. “The train is coming.”</p><p>Osamu follows his gaze down the track. He doesn’t see or hear anything, but he yanks Atsumu away anyway, or tries to. Atsumu won’t budge.</p><p>“Come on, Tsumu. Come <em>on</em>! We shouldn’t be here. Move.”</p><p>He seizes hold of Atsumu’s wrist, and runs.</p><p>It feels like pulling the entire track up behind him. Atsumu’s got his heels dug in, and he can be the most stubborn person in the world, when he wants to be; but it’s his lucky day and he’s not going to die here on the memory roads where who even <em>knows</em> if his stupid body will ever be recoverable. He’s not going to die because Osamu is here, and if there is anyone who’s Atsumu’s match for stubbornness, it is Osamu.</p><p>So Atsumu’s feet finally start moving, and Osamu does not turn back to see it. He sprints like the road’s a trail of gunfire. This time, he does not see a spectre of their past lives.</p><p>He sees hundreds of them.</p><p>They whisper in his ear, shadows wearing both their shapes. The orange peels and seeds give way to autumn leaves give way to seashells. For a stretch it’s stones and gravel again like it should be, and Osamu runs, and he runs, and he does not turn to look at the ghosts.</p><p><em>Osamu. Osamu.</em> His hand round Atsumu’s is sweating, white-knuckled. This was why they’d stopped coming together, this chorus that creeps up on him when he lingers too long. Their past lives feed off their energy combined, call their names until they can’t hear anything else, not even each other. Atsumu always wants to follow them. Osamu always wants to run away as fast as he can. <em>Memories can’t hurt us,</em> Atsumu says, and laughs.</p><p>Osamu never answers, <em>until they can.</em></p><p>He doesn’t know why this road’s gone so horribly wrong, but there’ll be time for questions later, if they live. And then the road ends without warning and they’re in free fall till they hit the hard concrete of another platform, landing without a sound. Osamu takes a deep breath. The air feels normal here. The sign above them reads <em>Shibuya Station</em>.</p><p>“I feel like an entire skytrain just ran through my head,” Atsumu mumbles. He’s not hoarse any more.</p><p>Osamu looks at him, at last. He’s rubbing his temples, forehead scrunched. The bruise on his left cheek’s already fading. Osamu curls the fingers of his free hand, turns away and presses that fist into a pillar instead.</p><p>“Let’s get out of here,” he says.</p><p>He does not let go. Even as they find their client, twenty years younger and a belligerent teenager loitering outside the station, even as Osamu watches Atsumu lay hands on the thread that leads him to the platform and a goodbye to his late grandmother instead of to the arcade with his friends, he does not let go. He holds on to Atsumu until they get home.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>“At 2:56 in the afternoon today, a city-wide blackout hit Osaka and lasted about an hour. Emergency generators were immediately deployed. At least two people in the University Hospital are currently unconscious and in critical condition after their life support modules lost power. The Kansai Grid Co is urgently investigating the matter…”</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The client seems none the wiser when he leaves, and the shard they bring back looks perfectly normal. An angular thing in smoky quartz. Nothing special about it, nothing at all, only a whiff of citrus that stays Osamu’s hand, and he leaves it out on the low table in the pod room instead of putting it away with all the rest.</p><p>When he shuffles out of his bedroom for a glass of water later that night, the light’s still on in the front hallway. As he goes over to turn it off, the front door opens and a blast of frigid air hits him in the face. Atsumu’s all bundled up in a blue chambray jacket and an oversized red scarf, one of a matching pair Aran knitted for them last Christmas. His pale breath grazes the warm air across the threshold, then he steps in and looks at Osamu, standing in his pajamas by the light switch.</p><p>“Huh. You’re still up?”</p><p>“That’s my jacket,” says Osamu.</p><p>“I just borrowed it!”</p><p>“Uh huh.”</p><p>Atsumu slips shamelessly out of the stolen jacket, hangs it up and passes Osamu a plastic bag on his way in. “Enjoy.”</p><p>He’s gone back to his room before Osamu can open the bag, or say anything about it; this is the closest he’ll get, Osamu knows, to gratitude. Fresh milk pudding, not the kind that comes in a six pack, from the specialty dessert shop two blocks down. Osamu takes it out, and he’s beginning to peel off the cover when he looks up again at the blue chambray jacket hanging behind the door, and stops.</p><p>Atsumu <em>borrows</em> that jacket all the time.</p><p>Osamu goes to the fridge and puts the pudding in, unopened. It does not occur to him to write his name on it. He walks across to the pod room, his feet moving as if through ankle-deep water, rising higher by the second.</p><p>He <em>hears</em> the shard before he sees it. The whistling of an oncoming train, looming, looming. It’s still sitting on the table where he left it, but in the dark of the room, it’s all lit up like a warning signal now. Fuzzing round the edges, turning the dying brown of autumn, the ghost white of a beach covered in broken shells.</p><p>Osamu breaks into a run, lights in the kitchen and the hallway still on, and he does not turn to see the fairy lights flicker gold and silver and wonder what that means, for he’s now in his room rifling wildly through the heap of clothes on his floor till he finds a pair of weathered jeans. Tucked away in the back pocket, there’s the shard he plucked from the laundry.</p><p>When he’d first found it, it was glitching round one edge, neon and sharp. Now, the whole thing is glitching like a chip corrupted beyond repair.</p><p>Osamu puts it on his tongue, tips his head back and swallows it whole.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>See him now, his mouth full of smoke and fire. He’s opening his eyes to a scene he knows, a bamboo forest his brother once dragged him into, a temple burning up from the wick of a fallen candle on dry wooden floorboards. An accident, they’ll say later, a tragic one, and the twins barely past boyhood, how terrible for Atsumu. How unforgiving, this summer heat.</p><p>See him peel away from his brother and say, leave me behind. Even injured, he’s the stronger of the two; even injured, he shoves Atsumu hard and tells him if he looks back, he’ll kill him himself.</p><p>So Atsumu’s fist balls up tight but the punch never comes, he’ll get help, he says, he’ll come back, don’t you move, Samu, and away he sprints. Neither of them are lying. Neither of them will see each other again, in this life.</p><p>See him lie back against a rock, and watch the flames come—</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>And see the forest itself swallow the fires, the smoke disappear from his mouth, a fork appearing in the road where there was none before.</p><p>His brother, refusing to leave him. Two boys fighting all the way down the phantom path, the one that shouldn’t be there. Where his feet should drag trails in the dirt, there’s nothing, no trace any of this was real.</p><p>Stay a moment longer than you should, and see the road for what it is. See the kinks where dust and ashes bleed into morning dew, the seams where one memory’s been ripped up and another stitched in by a reckless hand. His brother is tearing up the map and leaving the pieces behind, a mess he never bothered to clean. Here they are, jagged shards along the path, and then the grass and the leaves and the birdsong become fragments and shards too, and when his brother tumbles out of this dream, they are strewn all around the dreamer and he wakes up in a bed of glass.</p><p>Stay a moment longer than you should, and you might not make it out.</p><p> </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Osamu’s eyes fly open.</p><p>So he had died in the fire, after all, in that past life, the one where they were running through a bamboo forest. The thought does not disturb him. It sits calm in his stomach, like a pebble sinking peaceful to the bottom of a lake. There are no ripples on the surface. There shouldn’t be. Except there are, except the lake is a maelstrom and he has to sit down on the floor and press his head into his knees and breathe in the scent of their laundry powder to remind himself where he is, because Atsumu’s really outdone himself this time.</p><p>It’s risky enough, hacking someone else’s memories. The roads have a mind of their own. They have their ways, the both of them, of getting round that; Atsumu with the sharp point of a knife and Osamu the blunt side, Atsumu ready to fight, Osamu ready to coax. Rewiring someone else’s head, they can do that. Rewiring their <em>own</em>—</p><p>Osamu stands up. He doesn’t stop to check what time it is. Atsumu’s still awake. He knows this in his bones, even though the light under his door is off. He knows this even though the door is locked. He knocks and shouts and bangs on the door until it flies open, Atsumu standing there in the pitch dark.</p><p>“What,” says Atsumu, and then Osamu seizes him by the collar and yanks him forward.</p><p>“You’re messing with your memories,” he says. <em>Our memories</em>, he doesn’t say. “That’s why the roads are breaking. God, Tsumu, you idiot, you’re—”</p><p>That telltale curl in his bottom lip, kind and cruel all at once. How often Osamu’s looked at himself in the mirror, and never seen it; how often he’s seen it on Atsumu and thought, we really are two different people, aren’t we.</p><p>Osamu lets go. “It’s your fault, isn’t it.”</p><p>Atsumu tilts his chin and looks away, but not before Osamu catches the razor-quick glance to the window, where the street lights have been flickering on and off all night.</p><p>“<em>You’re</em> the one making the power go out. How many of those glitching shards have we sold? How many are in the grid?”</p><p>“I don’t know, okay?” Atsumu snaps. “I didn’t <em>know</em>. I know now. All I have to do is throw out all the shards I bring back, right, when I fix my memories? Easy.”</p><p>Osamu takes a step forward. “<em>Easy</em>? You saw what happened today with that client! I had to go in and save your ass because I don’t know what you’ve done, how much you’ve messed with the roads, but they’re going <em>wrong</em>, they’re getting corrupted—”</p><p>“Do you know how it feels to keep watching you die?” Atsumu says.</p><p>If this quiet had a colour, it would be the colour of snow on fire, and Osamu falls back on an honesty he knows won’t be enough to put it out.</p><p>“No. I don’t.”</p><p>Because he never sees Atsumu die. Because, unlike Atsumu, he never got used to the feeling of standing under a waterfall, never felt the urge to keep doing it, and keep doing it, no matter how violent the air gets. Because, unlike Atsumu, he’s never been convinced that memories are all that cheap.</p><p>Atsumu’s lip juts out again, twists funny. “I can’t change our past lives. But I can change my memories of them. What’s wrong with that?”</p><p>Osamu presses his knuckles into the doorframe. “Stop.”</p><p>“Stop?”</p><p>“Stop. And I don’t just mean, stop messing with your memories. I mean… all this. No clients, no memory roads, none of this for a while. Maybe a long while. Let’s stop, Tsumu.”</p><p>Atsumu takes a step back. He says nothing, but it’ll kill him, to keep his words shut up for that long, and so Osamu waits in the doorway until his brother says something, anything, to explode the silence.</p><p>“You want to close the shop?”</p><p>That isn’t what he’s really asking. Osamu doesn’t answer.</p><p>“You want to just—stop going on the roads? Just like that?”</p><p>“It’s wrecking you,” says Osamu.</p><p>Atsumu starts to laugh. A bold, daring spotlight of a laugh, one that Osamu can’t look directly at lest it blind him.</p><p>“I’m great. And I’m going to fix everything, and when the grid’s back to normal and I only have good memories left, I’m going to look you in the eye and say I had the happier <em>lives</em>. All of them. Every one of them. Get out.”</p><p>And Atsumu slams the door in his face, and locks it again.</p><p>Osamu tries the doorknob, then pounds on the door several times, yells back, but there’s only a terrible hush now and the snow on fire melting, melting.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>And so Osamu puts on his blue jacket, gets into their car and puts it in manual, and goes.</p><p>Manual, because the power’s on the blink and the city might as well be so much rubble without the grid humming like it should; the trains have stopped, the lanterns all down the pavement are going out and the billboards are on the fritz, and as he skids down the street towards the heart of Shinsekai, Osamu will take no chances.</p><p>He tears up the road, surrounded by blaring horns and frantic footsteps and a static growing louder, a noise that rattles behind his teeth. Fissures in the grid everywhere he looks, and everywhere he doesn’t. The radio, buzzing in and out until Osamu slams the button to turn it off.</p><p>
  <em>“And the power outage that hit Osaka earlier this afternoon, plunging the… in darkness, is… towards Kobe…”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“The Kansai Grid Co headquarters… shut down. We are… the building…”</em>
</p><p>Why hadn’t he seen it before? How could he not have seen, how hungry Atsumu was, has always been—how he could never stay still, always had to go one step further, push things just beyond their edge?</p><p>Tsutenkaku comes into sight before him, a beacon in the dark. Osamu stops the car at the base of the tower.</p><p>Tonight, he takes the stairs, two at a time. If the grid dies, he’s not going to die with it, trapped in a lift suspended halfway above the city. He’s about to run right past Billiken’s shrine when he pauses, thinks better of it and goes in to give the soles of his feet a quick rub, murmurs a prayer as desperate and real as any that’s ever been offered.</p><p>When he reaches the roof, he’s heaving and doubled over, clutching on to the torii for support, and Kita is there. Towel draped round his neck, a plum blossom in his hands and gloves hanging from his waist, traces of mud caked round their base. Kita <em>never</em> puts away his gloves still dirty.</p><p>“Osamu. Come.”</p><p>“It’s Atsumu,” Osamu says. The words come spilling out, and then he can’t stop. “Atsumu’s making all this happen. He’s hacking his memories, and not just <em>his</em> memories, he’s gone all the way into our past lives and I don’t know how many threads he’s tangled, how many memories he’s messed up, how much has got into the grid—”</p><p>“Come,” says Kita again, and turns, and Osamu follows, because there is nothing else to be done when Kita sounds like that.</p><p>Kita brings him to the outdoor tea table. There is a fresh bag of rice sitting on it, and a pot of tea with two cups.</p><p><em>There’s no time for tea.</em> Osamu opens his mouth, even as he’s sitting down opposite Kita, even as Kita picks up the teapot and starts pouring.</p><p>“You knew I was coming,” is what he says. “Did you know? About the blackouts? About Atsumu?”</p><p>“Why do you think I would know?”</p><p>“You know everything, Kita-san,” says Osamu, sincerely.</p><p>Kita picks up his teacup. “I’m only a farmer. Drink.”</p><p>So Osamu does. And he was not thirsty, not when he parked his car and ran for his life up this tower, but when the first drop of tea crosses his lips and osmanthus petals melt upon his tongue, he finds he is parched. He drains his entire cup in one breath, then pours himself another, and another.</p><p>Kita stops at one, and watches him in silence.</p><p>“What do I do?” Osamu asks, at last.</p><p>Kita folds his hands in his lap. “Memories have power. I know Atsumu says they’re cheap, and <em>who needs them, anyway</em>, but they have power. You sense it, don’t you? I’m not just talking about the kind of power the grid feeds on.”</p><p>Osamu takes a deep breath, finds it doesn’t come easy. He tries again. His lungs feel like they’re burning. He looks at Kita, and exhales. Up here, above the dying lights of a city brought to its knees, there’s nothing luminous, no neon reflections, nothing but the moon and Kita’s gaze, the colour of earth. Steady. Unyielding.</p><p>“In his heart, Atsumu knows that too,” says Kita. “That’s why he’s so afraid of them. But he doesn’t have to be. If you don’t remind him of that, they’ll eat him alive.”</p><p>Osamu runs a hand over his face.</p><p>In truth, it’s not like he didn’t know what to do. <em>Go after Atsumu.</em> He could have told himself that. But he could not have done so without breaking every speed limit in Shinsekai and nearly rupturing a tyre and coming up to drink three cups of tea with Kita.</p><p>And then the tower begins to shake.</p><p>Osamu’s hand drops. “What—”</p><p>Kita’s already on his feet. “It’s an earthquake.”</p><p>Swiftly, he takes Osamu’s wrist, pulls him upright and leads him into the greenhouse. The tower’s still shaking. Kita’s grip is the only thing keeping Osamu from making a run for it.</p><p>“Kita-san, shouldn’t we—”</p><p>“The tower is safe,” says Kita. “And the greenhouse is the safest place in the tower.”</p><p>He closes his eyes, begins to murmur; and out of habit Osamu inclines his head as well, holds that reverence for both of them. As the city quakes around them, as skyscrapers begin to crumble and the grid fractures beneath their feet, Shinsekai grits its teeth and braces against the shadow of Tsutenkaku. The amaryllis on the rooftop sheds its petals, rains blood and crimson red upon the battered streets.</p><p>And then as quickly as it started, the shaking stops.</p><p>Osamu’s head is spinning. “I have to get to Atsumu.”</p><p>“Yes,” says Kita. “You do. Take this with you.”</p><p>And he unfurls his other fist, the one that was holding the plum blossom, except there’s a plum in it now. A whole umeboshi, red and ripe. It doesn’t look like anything special. Like Kita himself.</p><p>Osamu takes it. “Thank you.”</p><p>“Eat it when you need to get home,” says Kita.</p><p>Osamu nods. He turns to go, but before leaving the greenhouse, he looks back at Kita, standing in the middle of his rice fields.</p><p>“Kita-san, can I ask if we knew you in a past life?”</p><p>“What do you think?”</p><p>“I think you’ve always known us.”</p><p>Kita smiles. “Go save your brother.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>See him now, running into a house with cracked walls and a potted begonia plant lying wasted in the backyard, photographs shattered all over the floor. See him kick in a locked door, mercifully weakened, and go to the body lying on the ground, and crumple with relief to know that this is not the life where he will see his brother die, and remember it.</p><p>He finds his brother’s heartbeat, a wild animal in his chest, and when he tumbles into the memory roads, everything is inside out and the plum in his hand is pulsing.</p><p>See the life where they weren’t separated at birth, the life where his brother never went away on a warship from the docks of Okinawa, the life where they were completely ordinary schoolboys from Amagasaki, and he tried to go his own way after high school, only to be persuaded otherwise—</p><p><em>No.</em> That’s not how it happened. That’s not how any of it happened.</p><p>See him holding on as tight as he can to his own memories, even as they’re being rewritten, life by life. He has no time to repair what has been torn asunder. His brother rends the sky and he can only jump through the gaps, make his way down roads that never existed, keep on running without looking down, for if he does, the sheer audacity of it all will hit him and his brain will take over and try to be <em>rational</em>, and he will wake to a city on fire.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Atsumu’s left a trail behind him so loud Osamu can’t hear himself think. So he doesn’t. Think, that is. He hits sand, pushes wisteria aside, wisteria that shouldn’t be there because it’s growing out of the sea, and dives headfirst into water instead of running across the surface.</p><p>There he is. He is not drowning, for Osamu can breathe in this water and so, too, can Atsumu. But he is sinking into a dark place Osamu can’t follow, and the seaweed’s nearly got him.</p><p>Osamu reaches, kicks harder, reaches again—</p><p>It’s no use. Atsumu’s going too far, too fast.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Want to know something, Tsumu? You’ll never win. Not in this lifetime, or any other. Because I’ll always be happier, to see you happier than me. </em>
</p><p>
  <em>It’s my victory.</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>And then, impossibly, at the bottom of the ocean, a god appears. One with shiny toes and an impish grin, and a gleam about its eyes that twinkles like a private joke.</p><p>“The god of things as they ought to be,” Osamu murmurs.</p><p>He swims over to Billiken, rubs the sole of one foot, then stops moving. The waters still. So does Osamu. He sees everything, the roads, past and present, as they should be, winding from his feet and from Atsumu’s too. Two webs, meeting in the middle and entwined in gold and silver, but distinctly their own. Suspended in time, Osamu holds out both his arms and closes his eyes.</p><p>When he opens them again, Billiken is gone and Atsumu’s in his arms, head slumped on his shoulder.</p><p>Osamu has a thousand things to say to him, across as many lifetimes.</p><p>In this one, he unclenches his fist, splits the umeboshi in two, and puts both halves in their mouths at the same time.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Spring’s first thaw is in the air when Atsumu steps out into the backyard, picks up a T-shirt from the laundry basket, and clips it on the line next to Osamu’s socks.</p><p>Osamu glances at him. Atsumu shrugs. “I owed you one.”</p><p>“You’re taking responsibility. Amazing.”</p><p>Atsumu swats him. But there’s no force behind it, and Osamu does not duck. He nudges the box of pegs over to Atsumu with his foot, and goes to sit on the doorstep instead. He could go back in, where it’s warm. But it’s a sunny day out, and Atsumu is up and about, and maybe, like this, he can pretend everything’s the way it used to be, for a while, until Atsumu speaks again.</p><p>“They’re really gone, aren’t they.”</p><p>It’s not a question, so Osamu stays silent. Atsumu sighs. He stares up into the sky, where the trains are starting to run again.</p><p>“You miss them?” Osamu asks.</p><p>Atsumu starts to nod, too quickly, then stops. “I don’t know. I don’t remember enough to know if I do. Is that terrible? I’m starting to forget the memory roads. All our past lives. It’s like a big part of me went missing, and I don’t even know if I should miss it.”</p><p>“That’s because it’s not missing,” says Osamu. “They’re part of you. It’s like… you’ve eaten them. When you eat rice, it becomes part of you.”</p><p>Atsumu starts to laugh so hard it turns into choking, after a moment. “Only you would come up with an stupid metaphor like that.”</p><p>Osamu flicks a clothespeg at the back of Atsumu’s neck, and stands up to head in to the warmth before Atsumu can throw it back at him.</p><p>He goes to the kitchen, checks his supplies again for the hundredth time. Bags of rice and umeboshi from Kita. Rice wine from Oomimi. Even Suna’s sent round some beer and edamame. On the fridge, a half crossed-out packing list in Atsumu’s hand.</p><p><del><em>toothbrush</em></del><br/><del><em>jacket (not samus)<br/></em></del> <em>remember to take the juice!!!!!!!</em><br/><em>and the onigiri!!!</em></p><p>Osamu takes a bowl of rice from the fridge and adds salt, oil and a sprinkling of shichimi togarashi, mixes it all together and rolls it into balls on a baking tray, which go into the oven for ten minutes. When they’re done, he glazes them in soy sauce and mirin and sticks them back in to watch them brown.</p><p>The first bite of a still-warm cracker, wrapped in seaweed, feels like things as they ought to be.</p><p>Tomorrow, Atsumu will leave on the train to Amagasaki. What he will do when he gets there, he doesn’t know yet. He just has a feeling, he says, that he’ll find something, and when he’d said this Kita had smiled, and said he thought so too. Tomorrow, a sakura tree on a rooftop garden will burst into bloom. And Osamu will turn on the light on his new signboard, restored after the earthquake; he didn’t even have to change all of it. Some things still remain.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>MIYA RICE SNACKS</em>
  <br/>
  <em>be happier, today</em>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This is <a href="https://jpninfo.com/31185">Billiken</a>!</p><p>Thank you for reading ♥ I'm on <a href="https://twitter.com/lightveils">Twitter</a></p></blockquote></div></div>
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